‘What for?’ he asked.
‘For whatever we can find,’ I told him. ‘You would have had some wonderful stuff to film if you’d been with me yesterday.’
He looked hard at me for a long moment and said: ‘I have not the strength. I’m not well. My back is troubling me.’
The day was riding high, wide and handsome into the deeps of the incredible blue sky. I could not argue with Spode to any good effect before the brittle company watching us so keenly; nor indeed could I force him to work when he felt he could not. Above all, I had no time to waste if I were to find food for the forty odd mouths I had to feed before the horseman of the day rode sagging on his scarlet blanket into his black stable in the west. So I just left Spode, the camp, and all in it to the great-hearted Vyan, and with the proved company of the day before took to the main stream. One extra makorro and crew of two brought up the rear. Vyan, apologetic to the last, stood on the island bank watching us out of sight.
This time we struck out up-stream. We travelled in the shelter of the papyrus on the far side of the stream for some miles until we came to a channel between two green cliffs. We turned into it and crept along it for about half a mile to emerge into a big and lovely lagoon. It was blue with light and Chinese with reeds and clumps of wild bamboo. Straight ahead of us rose a gentle yellow island mound with a great, glittering lechwe male surrounded by seven does coming like a dream of Joseph out of Pentateuch water. They were as yet totally unaware of our presence. Our guide motioned the other two makorros back into the reeds. In order to make his craft lighter he signalled to Long-axe to transfer himself to them and then with one long sweep of his paddle he took the two of us, alone, into a jungle of tall sedges at the side. There he put his paddles away, lay down in the prow with his chin over the edge and with his hands began to pull us by the shorter reeds foot by foot, slowly towards the lechwe. He did it so well and patiently that a mauve heron came floating low over my head without even looking down at us.
Once, when he paused to rest, the sweat running like water between his shoulders, I looked over the side and saw we were going down a line of baby crocodiles all drawn up, a yard apart, lips curling over white teeth at the corners, just below the surface of the still water. I tapped his shoulder to warn him, for they were old enough to bite off his fingers. He grinned endearingly and pointed at the opposite bank where another row of white-toothed infants was facing us. It all looked very official, as if we were witnessing a dress rehearsal for some trooping of crocodile colours.
I don’t know how long our journey lasted, but when finally the guide motioned me to shoot and I rose carefully to my full height in the unstable craft to look over the tops of the sedges, the lechwe and his brilliant women were standing half way up the slope of the island staring hard at the place where we had first broken into the lagoon. I shot quickly and he dropped where he stood. That was one anxiety resolved. We handed over the lechwe to the crew of the extra makorro to take back to camp, and then prepared to search the backwaters to the north of the main stream for signs of people.
As I stood there once more at one with myself, my surroundings, and my companions, I saw a new column of smoke rising purple in the midst of the papyrus approximately, I judged, at the place where I thought I had seen the young woman’s face in the grass. Comfort confirmed my reckoning and when I teased him, saying, ‘D’you think that smoke is perhaps just another play of water and shadow over the reeds?’ he laughed though he said nothing.
‘Well,’ I went on, ‘we’ll go and have a closer look at that particular smoke the first clear day we get!’
His reply was prevented by the flutter of a bird which appeared on the branch of a tree on the crown of the island, crying: ‘Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!’
They all wanted me to accept the bird’s invitation at once. However, I refused, explaining carefully that I wanted to come back and film the whole honey-bird episode. Comfort, self-disciplined as ever, set the obedient example with grace. Only he could not resist whispering to me, in English, that in his view it was futile to wait, because ‘the foreign master’ (as he called Spode) would never come. Not as pessimistic, or as clear-sighted, perhaps, in this regard as Comfort, I took the reappearance of the little bird as a good omen and went on happily to search island after island in the swamp.
Again we found no signs of recent occupation by human beings, only some more antique makorros rotting in the sun and damp. That, of course, was disappointing, and yet as the day opened out like a coral sea before us I felt increasingly uplifted by the tranquil lagoons filled and overflowing with light; and the islands, contemplative with trees and graced with palms, which succeeded one another so regularly that they still dangle like a necklace of diamonds and emeralds on a thread of gold in my memory. Each one of them seemed to have its own privileged view of intimate life of bird, reptile, and animal life to deploy for us. For instance, about midday when a wind rose to blow rose-pink through the silver air and tore the sound of our feet, like dead leaves, away over the waters behind us, we arrived at a green island meadow sunk in a round shelter of high woods. There, as still as if they were stitched petit point by point into olive-green tapestry, lay an apricot lechwe male with a harem of five all fast asleep around him. I watched them, barely thirty yards away, for twenty minutes as they continued to breathe deeply without opening an eye behind their long black lashes. My companions begged me to shoot but I couldn’t do it. As we already had our daily food, I felt it would be a betrayal of natural trust and such treachery to the deep feeling of at-one-ness that had grown in me since leaving camp that I feared some terrible retribution would follow the superfluous deed. So I led my companions carefully away like someone withdrawing from the bedroom of a beloved sleeper he did not wish to wake. The last I saw of the male was his long lips ceaselessly moving as if some dream had brought him to the pastures reserved only for his translation and his gods. Also I cannot stress sufficiently what a growing relief it was not to be solicited by the noise, and importuned by the colour, of my own metropolitan time. Our senses were totally immersed in sounds and colours that had nothing to do with man. I can only say that I found a new freedom for my senses in the swamp that day, so concrete, for all its imponderable expression, that it was as if a great physical burden had been lifted from me. That freedom had a voice of its own, too, for we all spoke instinctively in tones that we did not normally use and which came from us as naturally as the sound of the wind from the trees.
So it went on until we were all resting, not in the shadows of the tsetse-fly ridden copse, but well away in the shade of a lone quiver-full of palms. Samutchoso was carefully rolling up the discarded skin of a chrome yellow cobra we had found, hung out like some dandy’s washed cummerbund to dry on a screen of white thorns. The guide, I had noticed, when he found it had instantly handed it over to Samutchoso as though it were his right.
Suddenly Samutchoso looked up intently at me and said: ‘You know, Master, you won’t find many Bushmen here!’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
He explained at length that the tsetse fly had become so bad in the swamp that, even in his lifetime, it had forced his own people to withdraw from parts of the swamp they had occupied and cultivated before the Matabele first drove them out of the north. The Bushmen had either done likewise, or had died of sleeping sickness in the swamp.
When I asked where the surviving Bushmen had gone, he motioned vaguely with his hands, but stressed again that very many had died. Then he paused for quite a while weighing some issue carefully in his mind before he announced that he knew a place where Bushmen annually met. No! he could not say whether they were River Bushmen or not, only that they were true ‘naked Bushmen’ and that the place was not in the swamp.
Where was it? I asked eagerly.
Pleased with the startling effect of his announcement, he paused dramatically, but then it all came out in spate, though as he spoke his voice was like stealthy footfall for awe of what he said. Some
days’ journey from the place where he lived in the swamp, he informed me, straight out into the desert, there were some solitary hills. The Bushman called them the Tsodilo Hills – the Slippery Hills, and they were the home of very old and very great spirits. He had heard that European huts were divided into many rooms, and so, he would have me know, was the interior of the Slippery Hills. In each compartment dwelt the master spirit of each animal, bird, insect, and plant that had ever been created. At night the spirits left their rooms in the hills to do their business among the creatures made after their fashion, and the spoor, the hoof-marks left by their nocturnal traffic, could be seen distinct and deep in the rocks of the Slippery Hills. In a place in the central hill lived the master spirit of all the spirits. There below it was a deep pool of water that never dried up. Beside the pool grew a tree with the fruit of knowledge on it, and hard by the tree was the rock on which the greatest spirit of all had knelt to pray the day he made the world. The dent in the rock where his vessel with sacred water had stood so that he could rinse his mouth and hands before prayer, and the marks made by his knees as he knelt to pray over his creation, could be seen to this day. All around on the smooth rock surfaces there were paintings of the animals the great spirit had made, and in all the deepest crevices lived swarms of bees that drank at the pool of everlasting water and tumbled the desert flowers to make the sweetest of honey for the spirits. There, he said, among these hills, once a year, for a short season, the Bushmen gathered.
Deeply impressed by the manner as much as the substance of what he told me, I asked how he knew all this.
He replied: ‘I have been there, Master. I have seen it all with these old eyes of mine.’
‘But how did you get there? Why did you go?’ I pressed him.
‘I went many years ago, Master,’ he answered with great solemnity, ‘because my own spirit was weak and weakening and I needed help to strengthen it if it were not to die. I went to those hills to ask for help and I saw all the things I have told you of, and I was helped.’
Suddenly I began to understand and wondered why I had not done so before. First, there had been that glimpse of special authority the day I hired the paddlers at Ikwagga. And now this latest incident of the discarded cobra skin which I should have remembered was one of the great medicines and symbol of eternal renewal in Africa.
‘So you –’ I began.
For the first time he interrupted to say soberly: ‘Yes, Master, I am a prophet and a healer.’
However unlikely and superstitious it may sound in civilized surroundings, there on a far island in the unpredictable swamp, as the wheel of the day’s light, spokes flashing with the angle of the turn, went over the hump of blue to roll down towards the night, I was not inclined to be critical. Besides, I have always had a profound respect for aboriginal superstition not as formulations of literal truth, but as a way of keeping the human spirit obedient to aspects of reality that are beyond rational articulation. Even Samutchoso’s name: ‘He that was left after reaping’, took on an added meaning.
I put my hand on his stained old shoulder and asked: ‘Would you take me to these hills when we have done with all this?’
He looked long at me while all the others stopped talking, before he answered steadily: ‘Yes, Master! I will take you, but on two conditions. There must be no dissention as there is now among those who come with you. You must compose your differences with one another before we set out, otherwise disaster will come. And there must be no shooting or killing of any kind on the way to the hills. No shooting, even for food, until the spirits have given permission for it. It is a law of the spirits that none must come into the hills with blood on his hand, or resentment in his heart. Even if a fly or a bee should annoy you, you must not kill it. . . . I know of a Herero cattleman who went there with his herd in the rainy season. On the way he killed a lion which attacked a cow and that night the master spirit of the lions came from the hills and devoured him and his herd. . . . If you can promise me all that, Master, I’ll take you to the hills, for I too feel a need to go back there again.’
‘Of course I’ll promise,’ I said sincerely, not remembering that the words ‘Of course’ can be unduly provocative in a country still so truly of its own dark fate as is Africa.
I returned to camp with Samutchoso’s story in the forefront of my mind. I was eager to tell the others such hopeful news, but the taste for it was soon driven from my tongue. Somehow when I saw from afar three instead of two vultures outlined in the evening sky above the camp, I knew I was not going to have a chance. On arrival I found Ben was still far from well and Charles in great pain. Spode, after sweating under his blankets in the heat of the day, was only just up and not yet prepared to speak to anyone. The paddlers, with meat enough on their fires, perversely had found something new to disturb their brittle spirit. Someone had started a rumour that the launch was not coming back for us and that they would have to run the gauntlet of hippo and crocodile for two hundred miles on the main stream in their vulnerable makorros with a cargo of broken-down white people.
Comfort and I on my medicinal rounds mocked them out of that particular rumour and, as the night before, the return of Samutchoso and the rest of my black hunting companions gave them something more constructive to think about. However, the odd thing was, I discovered later, that at sundown that very evening our launch did have a major engine breakdown 180 miles up-river!
‘The trouble, Master,’ Comfort said to me when we had calmed them, ‘is that Karuso is king on water, but not king on land.’ He then asked as if ashamed of doing so: ‘But what will you do if the launch does not come?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘I’ve a good plan I’ll talk over with you if it becomes necessary.’
I spoke with more confidence than I felt because the night before the same grim possibility had occurred to me and I had been unable to sleep. I had decided that should the launch not come I would shoot enough meat to dry and so provision the camp for a month. I would leave Vyan in charge with Comfort to help him and take only Long-axe, the guide, and one makorro with me. I had already been told by the guide that he knew a way across the swamp where, if I didn’t mind abandoning the makorro after a while and wading up to my neck in crocodile waters, he could in two days bring me out on dry land fifty miles below ‘The Place of the Eddies’.
I was certain I could walk the fifty miles to our Land-Rovers in little over a day, and so, within three days of leaving camp, I would be in a position to organize a rescue party for the rest. I thought it wiser, however, to say none of this to the others for already there was a very negative atmosphere over the camp. So at dinner I tried to talk with a lively unconcern to my companions. However the conversation soon dwindled to an exchange between myself and Vyan, who was, at that hour, always his steadfast best. We went early to bed and all night I was aware of Spode uneasy in his net, and continually switching on his torch to shine at the places where ‘Augustine’ was transported with fierce relish at the sight of our camp. Ben, too, was in great pain and twice I got up to give him medicine. Still, I hoped that by morning our prospects would look brighter to all.
I was wrong. The paddlers were back in the mood of the night before, the sick were still sick, and when I asked Spode to come filming with me he said his back was hurting him too much for work. I offered to doctor him, too, as best I could, but he said only rest could put it right. I had to repeat the pattern of the day before, leave Vyan in charge, concentrate first on meat for the camp and then on the purpose of my journey. Again my luck held. Before ten I had shot two superb buck: my first precaution in case the launch should not return. Neither was an easy shot and yet the animals dropped like stones in their tracks. I sent the extra makorro back to camp loaded to the water’s brim with meat.
Relieved that the morning’s housekeeping was so quickly done, I made for the new smoke uncurling over the place where I had had that tantalizing vision of a young woman’s face among the reeds. Half a mile sho
rt of the smoke we found an obscure breach in the papyrus dyke against the main stream. We explored it apprehensively because the guide thought it might lead us straight into a hippo ambush. However, five minutes later we broke out of it into a characteristic Okovango back-water. Only to the east of us lay a vast expanse of papyrus already burnt down to the water’s edge by the fire, running with the noise and flame of an overland train, straight into the world of green. Past the black, ash-covered waste of water ran a broad open channel, and at the far end of the channel was an island where smoke rose like a curl unwinding from a cigarette between a smoker’s fingers.
‘People! Master! People!’ our guide exclaimed when he saw it, so excited that he breathed like a diver coming up for air.
The Lost World of the Kalahari Page 17
